GIFT EXCHANGE AND WORKERS' FAIRNESS CONCERNS: WHEN EQUALITY IS UNFAIR5

We study how different payment modes influence the effectiveness of gift exchange as a contract enforcement device. In particular, we analyze how horizontal fairness concerns affect performance and efficiency in an environment characterized by contractual incompleteness. In our experiment, one principal is matched with two agents. The principal pays equal wages in one treatment and can set individual wages in the other. We find that the use of equal wages elicits substantially lower efforts. This is not caused by monetary incentives per se because under both wage schemes it is profit‐maximizing for agents to exert high efforts. The treatment difference instead seems to be driven by the fact that the norm of equity is violated far more frequently in the equal wage treatment. After having suffered from violations of the equity principle, agents withdraw effort. These findings hold even after controlling for the role of intentions, as we show in a third treatment. Our results suggest that adherence to the norm of equity is a necessary prerequisite for successful establishment of gift‐exchange relations. (JEL: J33, D63, M52, C92, J41)     

Multiple Coordination Patterns in Infant and Adult Vocalizations

The study of vocal coordination between infants and adults has led to important insights into the development of social, cognitive, emotional, and linguistic abilities. We used an automatic system to identify vocalizations produced by infants and adults over the course of the day for fifteen infants studied longitudinally during the first 2 years of life. We measured three different types of vocal coordination: coincidence‐based, rate‐based, and cluster‐based. Coincidence‐based coordination and rate‐based coordination are established measures in the developmental literature. Cluster‐based coordination is new and measures the strength of matching in the degree to which vocalization events occur in hierarchically nested clusters. We investigated whether various coordination patterns differ as a function of vocalization type, whether different coordination patterns provide unique information about the dynamics of vocal interaction, and how the various coordination patterns each relate to infant age. All vocal coordination patterns displayed greater coordination for infant speech‐related vocalizations, adults adapted the hierarchical clustering of their vocalizations to match that of infants, and each of the three coordination patterns had unique associations with infant age. Altogether, our results indicate that vocal coordination between infants and adults is multifaceted, suggesting a complex relationship between vocal coordination and the development of vocal communication.     

Eastern Donors and Western Soft Law: Towards a DAC Donor Peer Review of China and India?

The international system is still governed by a normative framework designed mainly by OECD countries, especially with regard to soft‐law standards in the field of development co‐operation. However, the growing relevance of ‘Eastern donors’ is weakening its efficiency and raises the question of how compliance with these standards can be assured in a changing donor landscape. Despite efforts to integrate emerging countries into the traditional approach of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) to monitoring compliance through peer reviews, the aid architecture of the future might turn out to be a synthesis of established and new approaches.     

Mindful Leadership: Sind achtsame F��hrungskr?fte leistungsf?higere F��hrungskr?fte?

In the last years, mindfulness became the focus of increasing research interest in the health sciences. More than hundred studies highlight the positive impact of mindfulness based interventions on a variety of health relevant parameters. Mindfulness became a well-established intervention in clinical and non-clinical contexts such as stress prevention, substance abuse treatment or relationship counselling in couples. The concept has until now not received much attention in business contexts; implications and applications in this field are highlighted in this article. In particular, it is described how mindfulness may help leaders and managers to perform their tasks more successfully and in a much more relaxed way.     

Dienstleister der Finanzialisierung: Fragmentierte Organisation und kalkulierte Profite in der Immobilienwirtschaft

The financial crisis of 2007 has brought questions about the social order in capitalist societies back into the limelight. Economic sociology in particular emphasizes the growing influence of financial markets?? actors and logics. Most research focuses on macro phenomena or intra-organizational and individual perspectives. In contrast, concepts of financialization that explicitly take an inter-organizational perspective are in their infancy. Therefore, this article investigates the business and financing practices of a Europe-wide real estate firm. The historic case study shows the importance of service firms in the real estate sector and analyzes cooperation between different financial service firms (banks, estate agents, notaries, auditing firms, customers). Furthermore, it investigates how they jointly organize border-crossing and the relocation of legal liabilities and economic accountability. The article thus contributes to the current financialization debate in two ways: for one, it analyzes and explains inter-organizational cooperation between different service firms as being constitutive for financialization dynamics. For another, it points to the importance of calculative practices for establishing financialized corporations.     

Economic Growth and Child Undernutrition in sub‐Saharan Africa

Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in sub‐Saharan Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in Africa. We pool all DHS surveys for African countries, control for other correlates of undernutrition, and add country‐level GDP per capita. We find that a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with 1.5 to 1.7 percent lower odds of being stunted, 2.8 to 3.0 percent lower odds of being underweight, and 3.5 to 4.0 percent lower odds of being wasted. Other drivers of undernutrition, including relative socioeconomic status and mother's education and her nutritional status, are quantitatively more important. This suggests that further increases in GDP will have only a modest impact on undernutrition and broader interventions are required to accelerate progress.     

Developmental Trajectories of Social Justice Values in Adolescence: Relations with Sympathy and Friendship Quality

This study examined developmental trajectories of social justice values (SJV) in a representative sample of Swiss adolescents (N = 1258) at 15 (Time 1), 18 (Time 2), and 21 years of age (Time 3). SJV and friendship quality were measured via self‐reports. Sympathy was assessed via self‐ and mother‐reports. Latent class growth analysis revealed three developmental trajectories of SJV: high‐stable (80 percent), moderate‐decreasing (17 percent), and low‐increasing (3 percent). Adolescents with low levels of self‐ and mother‐reported sympathy were more likely to be members of the low‐increasing than the high‐stable or moderate decreasing trajectory groups. Adolescents who reported low levels of sympathy and friendship quality at 15 years of age were more likely to be members of the moderate‐decreasing trajectory group than the high‐stable trajectory group. Results are discussed with respect to the potential significance of sympathy and friendship quality for understanding the development of SJV during adolescence.     

Exploring Differences in National and International Poverty Estimates: Is Uganda on Track to Halve Poverty by 2015?

This paper explores causes of differences in estimates of poverty incidence in Uganda since the early 1990s as measured by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics and the World Bank. While both sets of estimates from the two organisations show a declining trend in poverty incidence there are important differences in the levels of poverty, the speed of the decline and the direction of change in the early 2000s. Methodological differences linked to the determination of the poverty line and adjustments for household composition are found to play a role. Assessing the effect of other potential causes is complicated by limitations in the World Bank’s meta-data.     

Auswirkungen der deutschen Unternehmensteuerreform 2008 und der österreichischen Gruppenbesteuerung auf den grenzüberschreitenden Unternehmenserwerb

Using a simple model under certainty we show the implications of the new group relief system in Austria effective from 2005 and the reform act of business taxation 2008 in Germany on cross border marginal purchase prices and marginal seller prices concerning incorporations. The results show that the new group relief in Austria does not imply a higher marginal purchase price for a subsidiary located in Austria by an Austrian investor in comparison to his German competitor. If the German reform act of business taxation 2008 is not taken into account a German investor is able to pay higher marginal prices at the Austrian and German transaction market for companies. Considering the German tax reform act the situation changes. Now the Austrian investor is able to pay higher marginal prices for subsidiaries located in Germany and Austria.